To keep its astronauts healthy on long journeys to the Moon, Mars, and beyond, NASA has partnered with Google to develop an AI medical assistant.
As humans journey farther from Earth, communication with medical staff or resupply of medicine become increasingly difficult. NASA is building tools to help astronauts diagnose and treat sickness themselves to solve this problem.
CMO-DA (Crew Medical Officer Digital Assistant) is an in-development space medical guidance tool that helps guide astronauts through symptom assessment and treatment when a doctor isn’t available.
It operates on Vertex AI by Google Cloud and is capable in all speech, text and image modalities.
NASA actually owns the source-code of the app, however, uses various Google services for most cloud solutions, it app development and AI training.
The assistant has previously been tested with an injury to the ankle, ear pain and flank pain. It accurately diagnosed 88 percent of ankle injuries, 80 percent of ear pain incidents and 74 percent of flank pains in tests.
NASA wants to enhance the system with data from medical devices and give it an understanding of space-relevant problems, such as the effect of microgravity on the human body.
Although experts said it could also help with improving health care here, it’s unclear whether Google will seek permission to apply this tool to Earth.
Google engineer David Cruley said the project could eventually help people on Earth by making the specialized of advanced medical assistance easier to obtain by advanced technology beyond Earth to the region, facilitating travel to more remote areas.
